Can’t We All Just Enjoy Football Star Sam Gordon Instead Of Dragging Her Impending Puberty Into It?

Sam Gordon is this amazingly talented, ferociously fast football star who is owning the sport. At nine-years-old, this kid is jaw-droppingly fantastic. As a mom of my own daughter I’m sick of reading comments where people are dragging the fact she will one day reach puberty and how it will mess up her football career into the conversation. Can’t we just celebrate how great Sam is without bloviating about how her period will affect her talent?

Monday she’ll meet Steve Young and watch Monday Night Football. And in a couple weeks, “Sweet Feet” is hoping to catch a Giants game in New York and meet NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who phoned her dad this week to congratulate him.

Oh, and she’s also been invited to do some public speaking. At age 9.

But instead of simply marveling at how great of a player this little girl is, one of the main responses to the articles and videos posted about her is “Just wait until she hits puberty” or “Wait until the boys on the team reach puberty and they can smoke her.” No, let’s not do that! Let’s just let this kid play amazingly well at a sport she loves and stop dragging puberty into it. Are people that hurt that a girl is so good (and better than the majority of boys) that they have to rain on the celebration by being all doomsday about this girl’s career as a footballer before it has even started yet?

I can understand people posting concerns about how tackle football is dangerous for kids, boys and girls included. But I can’t understand some of the negativity directed at a little girl playing football just because she is a girl. According to Sam and her father, all though she loves football, she has other plans for the future:

“She’ll play football for the next two years,” Brent said Sunday. “Then she’ll want to focus on soccer.”

I have a feeling she’ll dominate on the soccer pitch as well. I’m sorry everyone is so butthurt about a little girl being so amazing at football, but the only people who are allowed to discuss her impending puberty are her parents.